Large or Small Bees?

A natural hive isn’t composed of one size bee, or a single sub caste of workers:

virgin queens travel far from their hives

and they mate with many drones in drone congregation areas

this insures genetic variability and sub caste diversity

Mongrel bees, on a natural comb, yield a worker population that is diverse in size and genetics. That’s the ultimate combination for survival.

A hive needs small cell sized bees and comb to thrive. It also needs large cell sized bees and comb. Or there wouldn’t be so much large cell sized worker comb built. And the queen wouldn’t prefer to lay in it during the summer.

Historical Cell Measurements

A.I. Root measured cell size before foundation was made. He also describes efforts to arrive at a workable foundation size and European efforts at bee enlargement. His son continued writing about these issues.

Today’s worker cell sizes measurements fall well within the ranges found in natural comb before foundation was produced. Bees draw out the same range of cell sizes regardless whether they’ve been on natural comb, regressed, or raised on small or large cell comb.

There’s no artificially large foundation commercially available in the US.

Regression Anyone?

What:

no cell size memory

no artificially enlarged foundation in common use

no large or small cell bees

So, there’s no need for regression.

Without regression, there’s no need, or reason to kill one’s bees to save them. Regression commonly kills at least 75% of the hives. This loss was seen as a necessary step in selecting small cell bees. It was thought that a better adapted small cell survivor was obtained to replace the defective large cell bees.

Without regression, there’s no need for:

isolated mating zones

out of season mating

complete boxes of perfectly drawn out small cell size comb

and there’s no need to search out a feral source for small cell survivors

What other small cell practices could be changed or dropped? How would this make running small cell hives easier?